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A Tuesday Rant....Slow Down!

8/21/2018

5 Comments

 
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At my age, I really don’t know why I’m surprised when people do stupid things.  In my time I’ve seen plenty of poor decision making, and I’m not exempt by any means, I’ve tasted shoe leather plenty, I’ve assumed wrongly and had my share of ditsy moments, but, and there’s always that three letter word, I don’t understand putting one’s life in peril or others around you.   I suppose the Darwin Awards continually need new recipients doing the asinine to win a toe tag and like the comedian Ron White says, don’t call it a loss when someone dies in the throes of a senseless, idiotic, stupid episode.  Maybe they were someone we could afford to lose.  Now don’t leave negative comments, Ron’s words not mine.  I’m not saying anyone deserves to die, but I just witnessed a prime example of people tempting fate and not only with their own well-being, but they were playing fast and loose with other people as well. 

Wednesday morning I drove hubby to Chester for Race-week, and on my return home there were a number of bicycles out on tour.   They were broken up into small groups, perhaps they do this for traffic reasons, no more than six in a row allowing cars to weave in and out of the clusters along the highway or maybe they were sorted by ability and speed, I noticed a number of the riders in the back were elderly. 

Western Shore and Martins River roads are far from straight.  From an aerial view they would look like winding snakes, with poor visibility as sharp corners cut the view ahead.  Time after time cars gunned their engines, pulled out and passed cyclists on corners, without being able to see what might be heading toward them at 70 or 80 Km.  I clenched my gut time after time, waiting for the worst case scenario as drivers took life threatening chances.  Hey, I know Mahone Bay is beautiful folks, I live there, but if you’re in that much hurry to get to my town, to the tune of risking death to you and yours, hell, it ain’t worth it.

The cyclists were nervous, looking over their shoulders as cars behind them crowded too close.   I was late for work but never considered jeopardizing my vehicle, my life, an oncoming car’s occupants and the lives of the cyclists to get there.  At times I was going 20 km and when we reached inclines as slow as 10 km and was perfectly happy to wait until the coast was clear to pass.  
One by one all the cars ahead of me pulled out in dangerous situations to get by without passing lanes and visibility.  When I became the lead vehicle behind the bicycles with a dozen or so cars trailing me, the closest one almost crawled into my trunk, pressuring me to pass.  I’m sorry but I wasn’t about to tempt fate; I obviously have far more to live for than the likes of all those that risked passing at precarious moments.   

Unable to wait, one at a time, three vehicles whipped past my car and the cyclists on corners without more than two car lengths of visibility.  Once to my horror, an oncoming car came round the bend and the passing vehicle pulled back on their side of road, sending the cyclists off the road to the gravel.  There was only seconds to spare from a head-on collision.   

The cyclists had to be sh@##%*g bricks because I was.  An accident would have caused a major pile up of cars and bicycles.  Death comes soon enough without racing towards it at mach speed so perhaps, if you have a death wish, go play Russian roulette somewhere else, maybe use a gun so only you pay the price for your thoughtless actions.  Where is common sense anymore?  What’s wrong with waiting an extra minute for a safe place to pass?  They did occur; I waited and passed with a good view of the road ahead.  It can be done!    

The cyclists were enjoying the fresh air and exercising their bodies.  They should be applauded not run down, side swiped or made nervous because someone has  a distorted sense of their own safety while driving in a big hunk of metal. I used to ride a motorcycle and I know there is little respect or thought for bikers on the highway and now with road rage and impatience on the rise, accidents are more inevitable.  Really, one can’t even call them accidents anymore. That infers a mistake on someone’s part, a momentary lapse of judgment.  This is pure carelessness.  Zero consideration for your fellow human beings.  You think a flesh and bone body is a match for a 4000 pound vehicle in a head on collision at 80 km an hour?  We should all be made to see coloured photos of the aftermath of a car crash and perhaps every two years as a refresher.  If more people made driving decisions with their brain instead of letting their foot do all the thinking, it would be a much safer world.  


5 Comments

The red dot saga continues.....

8/16/2018

3 Comments

 
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Furtherance to the previous blog about the 36” wide Red Dot not being manufactured anymore; I’ve received numerous phone calls, emails and comments on FB about alternate ideas on how to draw off patterns.  Some were quite innovative but any would demand a drastic change in the way we do things at the studio.  Light tables would be my first choice but then we’d have to create all our patterns on some sort of see through material, preferably vinyl and then where to source that and what sizes I can get.  The heavy art paper I use wouldn’t allow the light to show through enough to see the design through the linen with clarity.  We’d have hundreds of designs to do over as the red dots wear out; we’d need a year of Sundays to convert them. For future designs we could start putting smaller ones on vinyl and use our existing light table, saving the red dot for the big ones.  Red Dot can be pinned to the backing nicely so the linen doesn’t shift around which it tends to do, and with red dot you can stretch out the linen corners so they are square as it tends to curl along the edge.  Once you stretch the linen and pin it to the red dot it stays.  Taping linen to the glass would be tricky as it is slippery as heck to work with and tape wouldn’t stick well.  Duct tape would hold it but then leave residue on the linen and my customers would love that!  Not! 

Converting all the designs we have now would be labour intensive and then storage would be a problem with all the patterns rolled up so they don’t have creases where it would wear and crack over time. We’d need an entire room dedicated to patterns!  I like tucking them in the filing cabinets, nice and neat. 

The surface for transferring has to be flat or it would be harder to work on with a marker.  I suppose we could tape it all down to the glass first but tape can leave residue that would need cleaning off.  I hate tape, it’s one of the banes of my existence, it sticks to stuff.  I’m not trying to be funny because that’s what its designed to do, but it’s indiscriminate and leaves behind a film places you don’t want it too and that can be a bitch to remove.   I could do an entire rant on tape, especially the cheaper stuff you buy at Staples because it’s horrid to work with.  It comes off the roll easily but is flimsy and moves in the slightest breeze, sticking on itself like hugs at a family reunion and good luck tearing it apart.  Then you have to use twice at much on parcels because it doesn’t grab well, you have to rub it several times to keep it to stay in place. We now only buy expensive tape from the post office, they understand shipping and quality products, producing one that is heavier, sticks well and ranks low on the cursing.   
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Anyway, I wanted to say that I appreciate all your comments and thanks for taking the time to respond.  I think perhaps our future might encompass a large light table and I am more than happy to undertake that down the road as the last resort, but in the meantime I’ve broke the bank buying up as much of the red dot as I can afford.  Damnit! I don’t like change so I am fighting it, throwing punches with my VISA.  I just ordered two more bolts from Fabricville at loan shark pricing, but that will do a lot of patterns so I don’t have to worry about running out anytime soon. Really, I only delaying the inevitable and with my luck they'll start producing it again and I'll have wasted my money buying it at retail pricing. 

I hope to do a lot of designing this fall so I'll try not to begrudge it....

3 Comments

Red Dot Demise....

8/13/2018

16 Comments

 
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In a world that constantly changes, things come and go, and rug hooking supplies are no exception.  For those that don’t already know, Red Dot tracing material is no longer being produced and no one is crying more than me.  It actually scares the heck out of me.  We will never stamp our patterns so what’s a girl to do?  We have a small light box that hubby built for me back when I opened the studio which will be hauled out and dusted off for smaller patterns but what to do about the larger ones?  Using a light box while trying to keep the linen straight and moving it around to capture all the design will be a nightmare.   Not to mention our tables are too high for the box so we have to modify or build another work area and where is that supposed to reside?

There is a substitute red dot on the market, better in that it is 45” wide instead of the standard 36”, but it’s too thick and the marker doesn’t bleed through.    I ordered a sample to try with high expectations and was sadly disappointed. It only works half as well and only with a marker with a sharp point.  Once the marker dulls and loses some of its ink, good luck.   Markers are not cheap so we try to maximize what we get from them and that will be a thing of the past once we are forced to use the new stuff.   

I found a few sources of the old Red Dot and bought up as much as I could paying a hefty price of $8.00 a yard at Fabricville, but what option did I have?  Deborah certainly gets the most out of the red dot patterns we have, using them until they are thread bare.  I’m hoping the rug hooking community will scream and holler so the company puts the good Red Dot back on their production line, pretty please before my stock dwindles.    

Unfortunately, we will no longer be selling it to the public.  We have to covet what we have to stay in business.  Folks have moaned at us but I don’t really think they understand how important producing patterns is to our shop.   I would hate to think the lack of red dot is what foils us, causes us to close our doors.  We manage to carry on with a low Canadian dollar, the high cost of US exchange when ordering supplies from the states kills us, it takes 30% or more of our profit margin right off the top.  We survived losing the source of burlap, managed a frightful year when Majic Carpet Dyes were unavailable, and many other changes that put us in a bit of a tail spin, it would be devastating to think something as thin and simple as a tracing medium could be the end of us. 

Some people use screening material but storage on that would be tough as it couldn’t be folded like red dot and filed away with the original drawings in our cabinets.  We’d have rolls of it all over the place.  We might have to think outside the box, the light box that is, and come up with solutions to this dilemma.  Perhaps there is an interfacing on the market that is thinner; if anyone knows of such a product please let us know.  When I bought what I could find I paid a premium but at this point beggars can’t be choosy so I doled out as much cash as was needed to get it to our door.  We will be using it sparingly; every scrap will be utilized, treated like gold.   

Usually we can get 30 or more patterns out of the tracing material and sometimes more.  Over the weekend hubby worked to create a new red dot for one of our patterns called Catch of the Day II.   A customer ordered the pattern and all I could think while I was drawing it, what a saint Deb is to have worked with such a crappy piece of red dot.  It stuck to me like spider webbing, any roughness to my hands grabbed it so it was difficult to pin to the linen when I was always pulling it off.  For me the feeling of the polyester on my fingers is worse than fingernails on a blackboard.  There was swearing and yucks coming out of me until hubby stepped in to the rescue.  In all good conscience, after I struggled to make a pattern for an order, I couldn’t put that old red dot back in the drawer for Deb to use so hubby drew off a new one.   
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I don’t like change, I’m about as flexible as a two by four, perhaps even as thick, so I fight the new and don’t adapt to anything that makes my life harder.  In this day and age life should be getting easier, not taking a step backwards.  All this new-fangled crap isn’t worth the powder to blow it up.  Red Dot don't RIP, come back kicking and screaming, we need you!  If not I'll have to embrace another change and crawl begrudgingly over this latest hurtle to make room for the next problem that's waiting in the wings. 

​So I've had my rant and now I will chill.....after all, it’s not like The Dorr Mill stopped selling natural wool……  

16 Comments

Sorry, closing for two days......

8/1/2018

0 Comments

 
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Due to overlapping personal events for Shane, Deborah and I, we will be closing the shop Monday August 6th and Tuesday August 7th.

We will be back to normal hours on Wednesday August 8th.
0 Comments
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    Max Anderson, Australia, recipient of my Nova Scotia Treasures rug.  An award of excellence for promoting Canada through his writing.  
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